Just a few years ago, France was considered to be late in term of Internet usage, broadband, mobile phones, etc. compared to its European neighbors and the US. This is currently changing very quickly and in some areas, like broadband, France is now a leading country.

In this longer post, I will try to present some of the interesting stuff that is happening here.

Mobile phones: 3G is here

End of 2004, the two main French mobile operators, Orange and SFR, launched their 3G services. The third one, Bouygues Telecom, will follow too (I wrote about them before, I’m a customer).

Here is a review (in French) of Orange 3G service, named Orange Intense. Its main selling argument is mobile TV. At launch there were 11 TV channels, plus sports, movie trailers, etc. Video telephony is there too, and it’s good to see that SFR and Orange video telephony services are already interoperable. There are only 7 phones, and they still need improvements. Half of the French cities with 50.000+ inhabitants are covered.

As always one can choose between several calling plans. For example 5 hours of voice or video telephony are 75 Euros per month. This includes free calls after the 3rd minute toward all Orange fixed and phones. Note for my American readers that in Europe you are not billed for the incoming calls. It also includes 15 videos / month (25 MB which can also be used on laptop or PDA). For the comparison, 5 hours on 2G are between 49 and 57 Euros by Orange.

Broadband: Tough competition

The regulator in France has been requiring the historic operator France Telecom to open the “last mile” (infrastructure at the neighborhood level) to competition, and this has created a very competitive market with many smaller broadband operators having ADSL offers starting at 15 Euros / month ($12).

The most dynamic broadband operator in France is Free. Their ADSL offer, for 30 Euros/month, consists of 20 Mbit/s in download, 1 Mbit/s in upload, unlimited phone calls in France and several TV channels. The modem, called Freebox, has a phone jack as well as a Scart (”peritel”) jack for the TV. Today they offer over 100 channels, some free, some with subscriptions. The interesting aspect of the TV offering is that they have the capacity for 15.000 channels (are there that many channels in the world?), which is of course much more than satellite or cable can offer. The Freebox can also be transformed in a Wifi box by simply adding a Wifi PC-Card.

Also very exciting are the new services they are preparing to launch, probably in 2005. Since the Freebox has a USB plug, is already plugged to a screen - the TV, and has a phone number attached to it, just add a cheap webcam and you have everything for a video-telephony system over ADSL. In fact, France Telecom has already launched a video-telephony system, they rushed it out since Free has beaten them on the phone and TV over ADSL, they didn’t want it to happen a 3rd time.

The other new service Free is preparing is Video-On-Demand. It seems like the Freebox has a bay ready to receive a hard-drive. This service might look closer to a Netflix type of service, where you choose your movies on a web site and a few hours later they are available on your Freebox for watching.

Wifi: On the good track

On the Wifi side, France has been lacking a bit behind other countries (like Estonia). Free hotspots are still rare and commercial ones were quite expensive. But it is improving, a good sign being the recent announcement (in French) that the hotspots of SFR and Orange are now interoperable. It means that customer of Orange Wifi offer can use without additional costs the hotspots of SFR and vice-versa. This represents 7.000 hotspots.

Even blogs!

And France seems even to embrace blogs. Blogs have made the cover of a big national newspaper and another one, Le Monde, is offering blogs to their readers, under the Le Monde brand, mixing their journalists blogs and their reader’s blogs.

As a geek, I can start to be proud of my country again! And I’m moving to an even better country in that respect!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 31st, 2005 at 10:47 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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